A camera-less lettrist film about fear of flying, security checks and time zones. After returning from a trip to Tokyo, the protagonist is stuck at a hotel nearby the Helsinki airport. The use of various technical devices, slivers the time-management and modifies the jet-lagged consciousness.

Mika Taanila (s. 1965) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. He works with documentaries, experimental film and visual arts. Human engineering, utopias, failures and man-machines are recurring themes in his films and installations. Taanila’s works have been shown at major international group shows, such as Aichi Triennale (2013), dOCUMENTA (2012), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Berlin Biennale (2004), Manifesta (2002) and Istanbul Biennial (2001). Solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki (2013–14), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2013), TENT, Rotterdam (2013) and Galleria Heino, Helsinki (2010). Taanila’s short films have been screened altogether at more than 300 international film festivals and special events. In 2015, Taanila was awarded with the prestigious Ars Fennica Award, the biggest Finnish art award.

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Mika Taanila

Mika Taanila produces a lettrist film without a camera, about the fear of flying, security checks and time zones. After returning from a trip to Tokyo, the protagonist is stuck at a hotel near Helsinki airport. Various technical devices make him lose all sense of time. His consciousness is modified, already altered by jet lag.

In Breu (Pitch black), the recorded images present, in a non-linear montage, the semi-artisanal paving process of a rectangle arbitrarily drawn in the middle of a vacant lawn. The soundtrack brings a circular text that overflows in modal adverbial adjuncts (mainly right and wrong),without defining any clear object, the text builds the speech in an endless cycle, onto which the ideas of progress and evolution cannot be applied.

JULIA KATER | 1980 – Paris, França
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Lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Graduated in Photography from the School of Advertising and Marketing - ESPM (Sao Paulo - Brazil).
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The research of the artist Julia Kater is guided in the elaboration of a body of work that can treat it from its visual improbability. Whether by the collage brought about by different overlaid photographic prints, which announces a watchful sky – despite its invisible character – or by videos that bring about the rearrangement of a set of actions and phrases, each work in its own way prioritizes the elaboration of bodies from everyday scenes that suggest simultaneous shared experiences with the persistent memory together with its struggle with forgetfulness, its ally and the cause of the gradual loss of a large part of the truths.
Kater regularly participates in exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, in countries like France, USA, Belgium and Portugal.
Her most recent exhibitions are: Abstratión, Galeria Fernando Pradilla (Madrid, Spain - 2016); No lugar que chegamos, MAC Jataí (Goiás, Brazil - 2016); Breu, SESI MINAS (Belo Horizonte, Brazil - 2016); Da banalidade - volume 1, Instituto Tomie Ohtake (Sao Paulo, Brazil - 2016); I Biennial of Asuncion (Asuncion, Paraguay - 2015); Simultânea: Fotógrafos latino- americanos da coleção Carpe Diem, Centro de Arte Carpe Diem (Lisbon, Portugal - 2015); Como Se Fosse, CAIXA Cultural (Brasília, Brazil – 2014); e Frestas - Trienal de Artes, Curated by Josué Mattos, Sesc Sorocaba (Sorocaba, Brazil – 2014); SIM Galeria (Curitiba, Brazil - 2014).
He has works on very importante collections, like: MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; MON – Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil; MARP – Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto, Brazil; Fundacíon Luis Seoane, La Corunha, Spain; Fundação PLMJ, Lisbon, Portugal.

Ra di martino Authentic News of Invisible Things

Vidéo | hdv | couleur et n&b | 5:30 | Italie | 2014

Authentic News of Invisible Things explores mechanisms of pretence and make-believe by focusing on military camouflage. Camouflage was first used at the end of the nineteenth century to help prevent armies from being detected by enemy forces. Colours and materials are used to conceal uniforms, vehicles and equipment and make them look like something else. Camouflage also extends to the construction of mock military equipment to confuse and deceive the enemy, generating a situation of alert.
Examples of this include dummy tanks constructed using wooden structures or panels of chipboard, and then painted or decorated. Used already in the Second World War and to a lesser extent in WWI, these are still widespread: in the 1990s fibreglass models produced by an Italian company were successfully deployed in the Gulf War.
Iveco Defence Vehicle (Iveco DV), part of the Fiat Group, headquartered in Bolzano, makes vehicles for military and civil defence purposes. The company receives orders directly from the Ministry of Defence to produce these vehicles and the production process and all related information is therefore covered by the Official Secrets Act. However once these vehicles are decommissioned they are no longer regarded as classified and can be used by the film industry, for marketing, entertainment and by private individuals. Indeed there are numerous collectors and theme parks in possession of working vehicles, also from foreign armies, that can be hired or tried out to get a taste of military life. It is therefore easy for the film industry to get hold of functioning, but unarmed vehicles, for use in battle scenes. The situation is therefore paradoxically subverted: real tanks enter the world of make-believe, while mock-ups are deployed in real-life conflict situations.
Authentic News of Invisible Things sits on the dividing line between fact and fiction, with documentary-style scenes and a theatrical re-enactment. With the support of historic photographs and film footage from public and private collections, the video becomes a sort of short journey through the paradoxes of both history and contemporary life.
One of the two key scenes of the video, which mingles performance art and cinema, has been shot in the historic city centre of Bolzano. A real-life, working tank drives through the city centre in broad daylight, with no prior warning to stage a paradox. Various cameramen hidden among the public filmed the action and people`s reactions.
The other scene is a recreation of an archive photograph of a group of French civilians gathered around a wooden dummy tank made by the Germans and abandoned in Lille, the 20th of October 1918.

Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975) studied in London where she’s graduated with an MFA at the Slade School of Art and after spending a few years in New York she moved back to Italy. Her practice explores the passage of time, as well as the discrepancies that differentiate epic narratives from lived experiences. Her films have been shown at the Venice film Festival, Locarno film festival and Torino International Film Festivals amongst other and in Istitutions and museums such as: Moma-PS1, NY; Tate Modern, London; MCA Chicago; Museion, Bozen; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Artists Space, New York. In 2014/15 she has participated to the Venice Film festival 2014, winning the SIAE award and Gillo Pontecorvo award, and a Nastro d’argento for best docufilm.

Bettina nÜrnberg, Dirk Peuker Franzosensand

Documentaire | hdv | couleur | 8:30 | Allemagne | 2016

The film `Franzosensand` centers on agricultural settlements founded by the
German National Socialitst on newly built dikes on the mudflat of the Wadden Sea (North Sea).
Of the settlements, the so-called „Adolf-Hitler-Koog“, was meant to be a prototype for a national socialist community.Today, the bleak and tidy landscape does not offer much
testimony to its history. Excerpts of archived materials that are interwoven with present-day images make the present appear as a surface built on complex, deeper layers of the past.

Bettina Nürnberg
www.bettinanuernberg.de
Bettina NÜRNBERG (1976, Germany) was educated in art and film in Hamburg, Berlin and Toulouse. The
work of the Berlin-based artist has been screened and exhibited worldwide. She founded the internet
platform vestibuel-film.
Dirk Peuker
www.dirkpeuker.de
Dirk PEUKER (1970, Germany) studied film and art in Berlin and Vienna. The work of the experimental
filmmaker and artist has been screened and exhibited worldwide.

Maya schweizer Texture of Oblivion

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur et n&b | 18:0 | Pologne | 2016

The film begins with footage of a city of ruins, when the entire cityscape of Warsaw is covered with stones.
It is 1945.
Themed around stones as carriers of historical memory, the movie is so closely filmed that the viewer can never see the city`s memorials in their entirety.
Special attention, though, is paid to the author of the Umschlagplatz Wall, a monument located in the former Ghetto.
Hanna Szmalenberg is explaining the process of realization of the Umschlagplatz as the camera winds through a snow-covered sculpture garden.

An easily overlooked T-junction in Copenhagen`s Sydhavn district
is the location of a dramatic statue. In the midst of everyday
urban space rises a bronze sculpture of a young man who is about to tame two unruly horses. The essay film ‘Breaker of Horses’ delves into the bronze sculpture and follows the hidden stories that are contained in the cast. This leads us back to the
genesis of the sculpture in an antique Greek myth, to a Belgian Africa museum and deep into Europe`s colonial past. With formal nods to contemporary video artists such as Camille Henrot and
Hito Steyerl, ‘Breaker of Horses’ is an overheated information flow of images, digital productions and archive material. The
visual abundance is coloured by a soundtrack that alternately seethes with synthetic sound effects and detached bits of songs about the statue and its history. The film traces the copper material in the bronze sculpture back to the Congo, where
extraction of copper through forced labour and slavelike conditions for the Congolese comprised one of the economical
foundations for the Belgian King Leopold’s empire. Solidly placed in the era of today, ‘Breaker of Horses’ is a video work that turns to the past.

Nanna Rebekka is an independent filmmaker based in Copenhagen. Her work lies within the realm of hybrid fiction, documentary and video art. She has studied filmmaking at Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington and at School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University. She is currently pursuing a masters degree in Visual Culture at University of Copenhagen. She is a former member of Copenhagen LGBTQ Film Festival.
Pernille Lystlund Matzen (b. 1986) is an independent writer and filmmaker currently living in Copenhagen. Her work concentrates on new documentary forms, video art and essayistic modes of filmmaking. She holds a masters degree in Art History and Modern Culture from Columbia University, Universität der Kunste, Berlin, and Copenhagen University. She currently works as an art critic at the Danish newspaper Information.
Together, Nanna and Pernille have directed the short film `Breaker of Horses`.

Julia Kater films the outline of a form on the ground. The process seems endless, where any sense of progression and evolution appears to be absent. Ra Di Martino observes the paradoxes of history and war, and reflects upon military camouflage, a tool for both dissimulation and simulation. False tanks are used in real wars, and real tanks are used for fiction. Maya Schweizer films the Umschlagplatz Wall memorial, in Warsaw, from where hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported during the Second World War. In this film, the memorial cannot be entirely seen, showing the paradoxical relationship of remembrance and forgetting. Nanna Rebekka and Pernille Lystlund Matzen film a bronze statue in Copenhagen, and track the hidden story, from ancient myth to Europe’s colonial past, to Belgian Congo where copper extraction made King Leopold II rich. In her film, Filipa César takes as a starting point the concept of ‘free zones’, a term used to describe the territories of Guinea-Bissau liberated from Portuguese domination, and administered, during the 11 years of the War of Liberation (1963-1974), by African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde Guerrilla movement militants.

Panic Book is both a set of drawings and an animated video. The drawings are made on book pages. The books often come from the family library, and deal with the political and philosophical thought of Yugoslav socialism. The pages then become part of a reconstruction of cult sequences of Hitchcock movies: scenes of fear, panic or flight.
This rereading of the legacy of Tito`s socialism that ended in a “cul de sac” is close to power-up mechanisms and disaster announcements used by the master of suspense

Born in 1987, Nikolic lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. Graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts (painting department) , currently in PhD, he received several prizes for drawing and a special prize for his mural installations. Initiator of U10 Art Space, a self-managed artist space, he was exhibited since 2007 in numerous solo and group shows in Serbia and abroad. In 2015 he was invited to Basel (List), Vienna (Parallel) and Paris (Cultural Center of Serbia). He is currently on show at Caixa Forum in Barcelona, Spain and Kunslerhaus in Vienna, Austria

Milutin gubash Language Lesson

Vidéo | 0 | couleur | 1:42 | Serbia | 2016

Language Lesson (2016) intercuts two tracking shots -- a shaky handheld approach to the Yugoslav dictator’s mausoleum, with a smooth following shot of my Yugoslav mother walking through her Canadian apartment corridor, and entering the small living quarters in which she will almost certainly pass the remainder of her days. If she’s not exactly an exile, she’s certainly cut off from her past, her friends, the sites where she grew up and feels most familiar, or so we may imagine just upon hearing her accent, which comes in the form of voiceover, where she gives us a little lesson in speaking Serbian. She says things like, “This is here, this is mine, this is shit, I don’t like this…”, alternating in English, then Serbian (subtitled in French). The thoughts expressed range from neutral, to (perhaps) happy, to disappointed or displeased. As she walks, her thoughts seem to change. Similarly, a change happens on the approach to the mausoleum, which at first appears lavish, in sparkling marble. We don’t know at first where we are, other than in a cemetery, the burial site of someone very esteemed, wealthy, important. After short bursts of the approach, we eventually see the name of Tito, which perhaps causes us to reflect on opulence in a land where there was seldom plenty. The camera drops quickly to the ground, where we apprehend a struggle between a colony of ants, which crawl in and out of the cracks in the marble base of the crypt, each fighting for the corpse of a fly. Notions of sacrifice and fellowship in the common pursuit of attaining a progressive, egalitarian social order, rapidly give way to an each-for-their-own, eat-or-be-eaten state of affairs.

In Vesna At the Monument (2016), a humble middle aged woman appears on the site of a dilapidated, in-the-middle-of-nowhere monument, erected likely in the time when she was youthful and at her most optimistic. The monument was commissioned in order to commemorate the heroic actions of common citizens in their struggle against fascism, and desire to promote and participate in a progressive, utopic state. She shuffles past the monument, and sits to smoke a cigarette. Off screen, a voice is heard, asking her questions such as what is the meaning of this place, this monument, this moment. She does not answer, as though she does not hear the question, even while acknowledging the camera, and the voice itself. It could, one supposes, be the voice of the cameraman or director, a voice in the subject’s own head, perhaps the voice of the monument itself, trying to ascertain the meaning of itself in this day and age. It gets no reply, and eventually (perhaps fed up with the question), she simply leaves, with the interlocutor left in his own uncertainty. The video seems to reject or deny a past, while expressing grave uncertainty to the future.

In Amsterdam, there once was a zoo, lions, elephants, people and Nazis. The elephants, who never forget, tell the story to the young lions.
During the Second World War, the story goes, eighteen Jews hid above the lions’ cages. The Nazis, who loved the zoo, cared about the lions and bought them the best meat, usually lamb. The old lions couldn’t eat all they were given, so they left some of it to their new “roommates” – for three years.

Karolina Markiewicz and Pascal Piron’s collaborative work creates links between film, visual arts and theatre. At the center is the individual person as part of a human community, oscillating between resignation and hope.
Karolina Markiewicz studied political science, philosophy and theatre and works as a film and theatre director. Pascal Piron studied visual arts and works as an artist and film director. Both work as teachers.
Their cooperation started in 2013, with an exhibition for Aica Luxembourg entitled Everybody should have the right to die in an expensive car. In 2014, they made a first documentary called Les Formidables, which tells the story of five young migrants in Luxembourg. In 2014, they found the video blog kulturstruktur.com.
In 2015 they worked on the project Philoktet, which includes the homonymous play by Heiner Müller and an exhibition relating the Greek tragedy to Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. At the same time they released their second documentary Mos Stellarium, produced by Tarantula and supported by Film Fund Luxembourg. Part of this project is the installation of Mos Stellarium, which offers different parts of the movie simultaneously, thus giving a non-linear reading of the film.
Their current work includes a video series entitled Side-effects of reality. It consists in a number of short films and video installations. Our reality is a vague and imprecise thing, hardly accessible. The core idea of Side-effects of Reality is to push this inaccessible reality to a poetic level, thus creating through video and text a new image of reality. This image is not the same as its content, it has its own mythology, and by this offers a different take on understanding our reality.
Sometimes we have to invent a new vocabulary to tell the truth.

Born in 1974 in Göttingen, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin. Between 1996 and 1998 he studies photography and media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld. In 1998 he transfers to the HGB Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig and graduates from Astrid Kleins’ class in 2002, followed by a master in 2005. In the same year he receives the Kunstpreis der Böttcherstrasse in Bremen. In 2006 he wins the German competition at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen as well as the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff-Stipendium. Wedemeyer exhibits at the Moscow Biennial in 2005 and at the Berlin Biennial in 2006. In 2008 he participates in Skulptur Projekte Münster. Solo exhibitions include Kölnischer Kunstverein and MoMA PS1, New York, in 2006, the Barbican Art Centre London in 2009 and the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2011. He participates in documenta 13 in 2012.

Christo doherty, Aryan Kaganof Lamentation/Klaaglied

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 18:0 | Afrique du sud | 2015

Blackface in a film about a secret war
Experimental SA documentary challenges hidden memories of a faraway and forgotten fight
Blackface and South Africa’s secret border war are exposed and explored in a poignant and troubling
new film by Christo Doherty and Aryan Kaganof, which was shown in Cape Town and Joburg (South Africa) for the first time in June 2016.
For 23 years from 1967 to 1989, young white men were conscripted to kill and die for apartheid during a
long deadly war on the border of Namibia and Angola. In 2011, Doherty presented his ground-breaking BOS exhibition of constructed miniature models and blackfaced conscript portraits based on the rare photographs leaked from the conflict zone, often at great risk to the photographers at the time.
Described by its directors as an ‘experimental psychic documentary’, Lamentation is a filmic response to Doherty`s BOS exhibition of physical suffering,traumatic memory and the border war.
Doherty and Kaganof’s 18-minute film is a formal meditation on the traumatic memory of an illegal war in which tens of thousands of young white South African men were forced to participate and uncounted numbers of black Namibians were killed or injured.
It is a contemporary attempt to explore one of the unexamined aspects of apartheid’s military misadventures, a conflict which killed and injured unknown numbers of civilians and well as soldiers and left a generation of men and women traumatised on both sides of the conflict.
The film makers are not afraid to challenge and to shock. And they stress that the film is about memories and understanding for all participants and victims of the border war, not only SA soldiers.
Lamentation’s delicate musical score, by leading South African composer Michael Blake, accompanies
the camera’s slow movement up the uniformed chest of a solemn white model with painted black face, cutting to scan a miniature scene showing the mutilated corpse of a black Namibian civilian alongside an armoured SA military vehicle.
Throughout the film, the disconcerting and shocking imagery is presented through an insistently choreographed interplay of cinematography and sound design.
“We know this is difficult material, but interpreted and constructed images in art are an important way
to reflect on a war which we don’t think South Africa has fully dealt with,” Doherty says. “Many white
men, including myself, firmly shut the door on their army days, yet the SADF was a dark formative
experience which we need to expose and understand.”
White soldiers: black faces
The filmmakers’ portrayal of white men in brown army uniform with black faces sparked controversy in South Africa, but the use of this make-up was a survival mechanism in the war.
The blackface device in the film and in BOS is based on the combat body paint used as camouflage in the Angolan bush by apartheid’s soldiers, ironically known to the white troops as ‘black is beautiful’.
“White faces painted black are currently taboo, but were very much part of a conscripted white soldier’s
experience during South Africa’s war in Namibia and Angola,” Doherty says.
The photographs in BOS, and now Lamentation, use re-enacted representations of this wartime practice, together with miniature reconstructions of scenes of battle and violence, to probe the psychological and ethical transformation of young men who joined in an involuntary battle against a
hidden enemy.
Beautiful music: origins of a difficult film
The film emerged through Doherty and film-maker Aryan Kaganof`s mutual involvement with the hauntingly beautiful music by South African composer Michael Blake, Tombeau de Mosoeu Moerane(2011) for soprano birbyne and 5-track (or 2-track) tape.
Written in homage to the little-known South African black composer Mosoeu Moerane, the film score features Lithuanian clarinet virtuoso Darius Klysis playing the birbyne, a simple keyless wooden wind
instrument.
The conclusion to the film is underscored by an extract from another composition by Michael Blake, his String Quartet No 1, performed by The Fitzwilliam String Quartet.
Cinematographer Eran Tahor’s beautifully choreographed and achingly-slow camera movements match the cadences of Blake`s music and provide a powerful visual sense of the isolated and estranging experience of South Africa’s war on a distant and dangerous border.
The editing and sound design by Aryan Kaganof bring together the music and the cinematography with
strands of found audio, including a voice softly singing fragments of "Die Stem van Suid Afrika", the old National Anthem.

Christo Doherty
Christo is Associate Professor of Digital Arts in the Wits School of Arts at Wits University. He is a
photographer and artist with a keen interest in the visual representation of conflict and trauma. He was
conscripted into the apartheid army at the age of 17.
Aryan Kaganof
Aryan Kaganof is a South African film maker, novelist, poet and fine artist. His extensive filmography includes Threnody for the Victims of Marikana, Decolonising Wits, Western 4.33, and Nicola’s First Orgasm. Aryan left SA aged 19 to avoid conscription into the apartheid army.

Christo Doherty, Aryan Kaganof

In his animation, Nemanja Nikolic proposes a reflection of Tito’s legacy, from drawings on books in the family library, books on the philosophical thought and politics of Yugoslavian socialism. The pages filmed revive scenes of fear, panic, and escape taken from Hitchcock’s films. In ‘Language Lesson’, Milutin Gubash superimposes a Serbian lesson given by his mother on images of Tito’s grave in Belgrade. In ‘Vesna At the Monument’, a woman walks the length of a monument erected during his youth, celebrating the fight of the people against fascism and the ideal of a progressive state. Pascal Piron and Karolina Markiewicz evoke the story of Jews who were hidden in a zoo for three years during the Second World War. Aslan Gaisumov reconstructs the moment of escaping with his relatives from Grozny where there was a war on in 1995. In ‘People of No Consequence’, he gathers survivors of the deportation of Chechen people to Central Asia 72 years ago. Clemens Von Wedemeyer assembles images of horses, filmed by a cavalry captain during the Second World War, between 1938 and 1942, examining pictorial spaces and the subjective camera at war. Christo Doherty and Aryan Kaganof direct a film about a secret war of the Apartheid regime. For over 23 years, from 1967 to 1989, tens of thousands of white soldiers were sent to the borders of Namibia and Angola to kill and die. The white soldiers covered their faces with black to conceal themselves.